About the Grade 2 Units
In second grade, children move from a “little-kid” focus on print to a “big-kid” focus on meaning. The first unit, Second-Grade Reading Growth Spurt, teaches children to take charge of their reading, drawing on everything they know to figure out hard words, understand author’s craft, and build big ideas about the books they read. Children learn that books can be their teachers in the second unit, Becoming Experts: Reading Nonfiction, in which they learn more about familiar topics and grow understanding of new topics while working on word solving, vocabulary development, and comparing and contrasting information across texts. In the third unit, Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power, children learn strategies to build three foundational reading skills—fluency, understanding figurative language, and comprehension. In the final unit for second grade, Series Book Clubs, children work within book clubs to study author’s craft to understand ways authors use word choice, figurative language, punctuation, and even patterns to construct a series and evoke feelings in readers.
About the Series
Drawing on learning gleaned from decades of research, curriculum development, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, teachers, and school leaders, Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project have developed the Units of Study for Teaching Reading. Designed to meet ambitious 21st century global standards, this reading series offers grade-by-grade curricula rooted in the Project’s best practices and newest thinking. It includes state-of-the-art tools and methods for teaching reading skills and strategies, grounded in the Project’s learning progressions for narrative and informational reading.
